As I was driving down Santa Fe Drive the other day, I noticed a train traveling along next to me. It was being pushed and pulled by seven locomotives. With a quick guess, figuring each car at 40 feet, the train was over a mile and a quarter long. Almost every car was carrying coal or oil.

Then I thought of the great-grandchild our family is expecting. What is this child going to do for energy?

They used to say we are fresh out of dinosaurs, or the time it takes to turn them into oil. Is anybody thinking of the plight our progeny will face in the future?

Neil Trudell, Littleton

This letter was published in the Dec. 8 edition.

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Patty Limerick, left, listens as Gov. John Hickenlooper speaks about fracking on May 2 as part of the FrackingSENSE lecture series at the University of Colorado in Boulder. (Jeremy Papasso, The Daily Camera)

Patty Limerick is a true voice of open leadership in the Colorado water community. I applaud her work with FrackingSENSE and FrackingSENSE 2.0 It is a great challenge to present a forum for open public debate on these critical environmental issues that affect us all. Thank you, Patty.

To hear more of her ideas and good work, listen any time to www.languageofrivers.com, streaming to you from the headwater state.

Rik Sargent, Greenwood Village

This letter was published in the June 23 edition.

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Gov. Bill Ritter took away some important lessons from his visit to the Alberta tar sands nightmare. His remark that adverse impacts from oil shale to Colorado’s water, land, wildlife, air quality, and communities must be thoroughly investigated before commercial development begins is the only responsible position for a politician to take.

What Ritter observed was one of the worst examples of irresponsible energy development in the hemisphere. Canadians are tearing out the heart of the wild boreal forest, the planet’s largest storehouse of climate-regulating carbon, to strip mine deposits of gooey tar sands to meet America’s relentless thirst for fuels. After the Illinois region, Colorado is the largest recipient of oil derived from Canadian tar sands.

And the impacts go well beyond Canada. It takes a huge amount of energy to turn tar sands and oil shale into fuel, making them a far worse source of greenhouse gases than conventional crude.

Colorado can become a leader in creating a cleaner and greener energy future. To do that, we have to prevent industry from filling our fuel needs with the dregs of the fossil-fuel barrel — oil shale, tar sands and coal.

Americans protest the war in Iraq, and we voted to give Congress back to the Democrats. But we use most of our political power to demand more oil. In a capitalist system, democracy is distributed in spending power, not votes, and certainly not the right to carry a sign down the street. Dollars change more laws than votes do. Read more…

Shame on The Denver Post for its coverage of Al Gore’s visit to Denver to present “An Inconvenient Truth.” The Post mentions that Steven Hayward, from the American Enterprise Institute, has offered a point-by-point rebuttal of Gore’s movie. Read more…

Is anyone else tired of hearing the oil companies tell us that the price
of gasoline is sky-high because aging refineries are off-line, and that
they have no plans to fix or replace them? With record oil profits, if
it’s such a problem, why doesn’t the industry upgrade its
infrastructure? It’s a fair question we should all be asking. Leads a
reasonable person to conclude that things are left the way they are
because it’s profitable. What other reason(s) could there be? We need to know. Read more…

In the 2 1/2 hours Dick Cheney reigned as king he could have: started a preemptive war, re-written the Constitution, appointed no-nothings to the Supreme Court, called up all the national guards and reservists, handed the military-industrial complex and big oil 100 billion or so, wiped out years of conservation legislation, made the vice-president a fourth branch of government, and told the Congress to buzz out of his business. Since he had already accomplished all of these acts he probably went hunting.

The politicians in Washington decry the fact that the Iraqi government is inept and incompetent. They have failed to create a unified government. They have failed to meet benchmarks. They have failed to make progress. They squabble and fight amongst themselves. While describing problems of the Iraqi government, CIA Director Michael Hayden recently said, “the inability of the government to govern seems irreversible.” Read more…

George W. Bush frequently states that Americans are addicted to oil. I do accept that Bush is an authority on addiction; however, essentials such as oxygen, food, water, shelter, clothing and fuel are “essentials” that are required by all citizens in order to exist and survive. It has been over twenty (20) years since a new refinery was constructed here in America. Read more…

We are observing the dawn of an energy revolution. Rising gas prices, increasing dependence on foreign oil, and acknowledgement of human-created heating of our planet are making people more conscious of our energy crisis. We must shift from polluting and ever more costly fossil fuels such as oil and coal, to renewable energy sources like wind and solar power. And we must stop wasting energy with inefficient lights, appliances, and vehicles. Read more…

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